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seize him and fling him at her feet. He wept and threw his arms round

her knees. For the first instant she was terribly frightened and she

turned pale. She jumped up and looked at him trembling. But at the same

moment she understood, and a light of infinite happiness came into her

eyes. She knew and had no doubt that he loved her beyond everything and

that at last the moment had come....

They wanted to speak, but could not; tears stood in their eyes. They

were both pale and thin; but those sick pale faces were bright with the

dawn of a new future, of a full resurrection into a new life. They were

renewed by love; the heart of each held infinite sources of life for the

heart of the other.

They resolved to wait and be patient. They had another seven years to

wait, and what terrible suffering and what infinite happiness before

them! But he had risen again and he knew it and felt it in all his

being, while she--she only lived in his life.

On the evening of the same day, when the barracks were locked,

Raskolnikov lay on his plank bed and thought of her. He had even fancied

that day that all the convicts who had been his enemies looked at him

differently; he had even entered into talk with them and they answered

him in a friendly way. He remembered that now, and thought it was bound

to be so. Wasn’t everything now bound to be changed?

He thought of her. He remembered how continually he had tormented her

and wounded her heart. He remembered her pale and thin little face.

But these recollections scarcely troubled him now; he knew with what

infinite love he would now repay all her sufferings. And what were all,

_all_ the agonies of the past! Everything, even his crime, his sentence

and imprisonment, seemed to him now in the first rush of feeling an

external, strange fact with which he had no concern. But he could not

think for long together of anything that evening, and he could not have

analysed anything consciously; he was simply feeling. Life had stepped

into the place of theory and something quite different would work itself

out in his mind.

Under his pillow lay the New Testament. He took it up mechanically.

The book belonged to Sonia; it was the one from which she had read the

raising of Lazarus to him. At first he was afraid that she would worry

him about religion, would talk about the gospel and pester him with

books. But to his great surprise she had not once approached the subject

and had not even offered him the Testament. He had asked her for it

himself not long before his illness and she brought him the book without

a word. Till now he had not opened it.

He did not open it now, but one thought passed through his mind: “Can

her convictions not be mine now? Her feelings, her aspirations at

least....”

She too had been greatly agitated that day, and at night she was taken

ill again. But she was so happy--and so unexpectedly happy--that she was

almost frightened of her happiness. Seven years, _only_ seven years! At

the beginning of their happiness at some moments they were both ready

to look on those seven years as though they were seven days. He did not

know that the new life would not be given him for nothing, that he would

have to pay dearly for it, that it would cost him great striving, great

suffering.

But that is the beginning of a new story--the story of the gradual

renewal of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his passing

from one world into another, of his initiation into a new unknown life.

That might be the subject of a new story, but our present story is

ended.